This invention relates generally to a training and assessment system and method for training and measuring one or more different areas of phonological awareness, phonological processing, auditory processing, and reading skills in order to train the individual in the one or more different areas.
It is well known that a relationship exists between phonological processing abilities of an individual and the normal acquisition of beginning reading and spelling skills. For inefficient and disabled readers and spellers, the impasse exists in the perceptual and conceptual elusiveness of phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of speech that correspond to the sounds of our spoken language. Our phonologically based language requires that students have a sensitivity to and an explicit understanding of the phonological structure of words. This explicit understanding of the phonological structure of words is known as phonological awareness. Phonological awareness skills are displayed by an individual when the individual is able to isolate and identify individual sounds within words and to manipulate those identified sounds. Phonological processing refers to the use of information about the sound structure of oral language to process oral and written information. These include, for example, verbal short term memory, sequencing and language comprehension skills.
The English language has words that are comprised of sounds in some predetermined order. From the vast number of possible sequences of sounds, words in the English language actually use a relatively small number of sequences and the majority of these sequences are common to many words. A child who becomes aware of these common sound sequences is typically more adept at mastering these sequences when the words are presented in their printed form (i.e., when the child is reading the words) than a child who lacks this awareness of sounds. For example, the word xe2x80x9cmatxe2x80x9d has three distinct phonemes /m/, /ae/ and /t/. The words xe2x80x9csatxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cbatxe2x80x9d have different initial phonemes, /s/ and /b/ respectively, but share the middle and final phonemes (/ae/ and /t/, respectively) that form the common spelling pattern xe2x80x9catxe2x80x9d. To a child with normal phonological awareness, our alphabetic orthography appears to be a sensible system for representing speech in writing. Thus, a child may employ the strategy of sounding out unknown words or letter sequences by analogy to known words with identical letter sequences. For example, the child may pronounce the unknown word xe2x80x9cbatxe2x80x9d by rhyming it with the known word xe2x80x9ccatxe2x80x9d.
Phonological awareness skills are grouped into two categories including synthesis and analysis. Phonological synthesis refers to the awareness that separate sound units may be blended together to form whole words. Phonological analysis refers to the awareness that whole words may be segmented into a set of sound units, including syllables, onset-rimes and phonemes. Both analysis and synthesis skills have been identified as important prerequisites for achieving the goal of early reading skill proficiency and deficits of either and/or both of these skills are typically present in children with reading and spelling disabilities. Auditory processing skills, including the ability to perceive sounds and differences between sounds, provide an important foundation for building phonological awareness skills.
In addition to these phonological awareness skills, phonetic coding has been linked to efficient reading ability. Phonetic coding refers to the child""s ability to use a speech-sound representation system for efficient storage of verbal information in working memory. The ability to efficiently use phonetic codes to represent verbal information in working memory may be measured by performance on memory span tasks for items with verbal labels. Children with reading problems have been found to perform poorly on memory span tasks for items with verbal labels. Thus, phonetic coding is an important skill for a reader. For a beginning reader, he/she must 1) first decode each sound in the word by voicing the appropriate sound for each symbol; 2) store the appropriate sounds in short term memory while the remainder of the symbols are being sounded out; and 3) blend all of the sounds from memory together to form a word. The efficient phonetic representation in verbal short term memory permits beginning readers to devote less cognitive energy to the decoding of sound symbol correspondence thus leaving adequate cognitive resources to comprehend what has been read.
Returning to the relationship between phonological processing and reading, an individual with good phonological processing skills and good phonological awareness tends to be better able to learn to read and spell. In addition, phonological processing deficits have been identified by researchers as the most probable cause of reading-related learning disabilities. Due to this link, many states have started to mandate phonological awareness training as part of regular classroom reading curricula. At the same time, school personnel are being required to be accountable and take responsibility for the classroom curriculum and the remedial reading services they provide. The problem is that it is difficult for untrained teachers to train a user""s auditory processing, phonological awareness, processing and reading skills. Thus, it is desirable to provide an auditory processing and phonological awareness skill training system and method that overcomes the above problems and limitations of conventional training systems and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.
The auditory processing, phonological awareness, phonological processing and reading skill training system in accordance with the invention may permit a user to improve the above skills in order to become a better reader and better speller. The system may include one or more training modules that each train a different set of skills of the user. Each training module may include one or more tasks wherein each task may focus training on a particular skill of the user. Each module of the training system is adaptive so that users at various different skill levels will find the training modules challenging. In particular, each training module may change the difficulty of a task based on the past performance of the user. For example, in some training modules, the difficulty of the task is increased when the user provides a predetermined number (e.g., three) of sequential correct responses while the difficulty of the task is decreased when the user provides a predetermined number (e.g., 2) of sequential incorrect responses. Thus, the system ensures that the current task is at a difficulty level that is sufficiently challenging to challenge the user""s skills but not too difficult to discourage the user from continuing the training.
In accordance with the invention, each training module may change one or more different difficulty variables to change the difficulty of the particular training. For example, a sound recall module may change one or more linguistic modifiers. The one or more training modules may be a sound recall module, a sound detection module, a sound blending module, a sound identification module and a sound pattern recognition module.
Thus, in accordance with the invention, a tool for training one or more skills associated with the reading and spelling skills of an individual is provided. The training tool comprises one or more training modules that train a particular set of auditory processing, phonological awareness, phonological processing and reading skills so that the user""s skills at the set of skills improves and means for generating a stimulus for the user for each training module, the stimulus comprising one or more of a graphical image and an audible sound. The training tool further comprises means for receiving a user response to one of the graphical images and audible sound presented by each module.
In accordance with another aspect of the invention, a method for training a user to recognize and distinguish a sound is provided. The method comprises presenting a first and second sound to the user wherein each sound has a particular set of acoustic components (i.e., one or more of frequency, energy and duration) that distinguish the two sounds and altering an acoustic component of the first sound to be recognized by the user by a predetermined amount in order to make the sound more similar to the second sound so that the first sound is more difficult to distinguish from the first sound. The method further comprises continuing to alter the acoustic component of the first sound until the first and second sound are identical. The modified acoustic components in accordance with the invention may include frequency changes and changes in the voice onset time (duration acoustic component).
In accordance with another aspect of the invention, a method for training a user to discriminate a sound is provided wherein the phonetic context of sounds to be presented to the user is selected to change the perceptual saliency of the sounds in order to change the difficulty of discriminating the sounds wherein changing the ordering of the sounds is based on the phonetic context of the sounds. The method further comprises presenting a first and second sound to the user based on the selected phonetic context of the sounds.
In accordance with yet another aspect of the invention, a method for training a user to discriminate a sound is provided wherein a phonetic class of sounds to be presented to the user is selected to change the perceptual saliency of the sounds in order to change the difficulty of discriminating the sounds, wherein changing the ordering of the sounds is based on the inherent acoustic and phonetic properties of the sounds. The method further comprises presenting a first and second sound to the user from the phonetic class of sounds.